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Chapter 27: Love and Fear

Osho,Sitting with you, there are two parts of me operating, one opposing the other. One part loves and trusts you more than any man I’ve ever met. The other is just plain afraid of you: afraid of your unwavering truth and the authority that it gives you, afraid of how vulnerable I feel in front of you, afraid that you could hurt me. Yet deep inside, I know that you could never hurt me. Would you talk about the disciple’s trust in, and fear of, the master?

It is a pure misunderstanding that you have two parts: one loves me and one is afraid of me. You are dividing yourself into two persons, a split personality, just because you don’t understand the deep relationship between love and fear. The psychological background has to be understood.

Love is almost like a death. When you die your physical body dies and you don’t experience it, because most of the time you die after you have gone into unconsciousness, so you don’t feel your death. Only people whose meditation has become complete can see their death, because they don’t go into unconsciousness.

The fear is.. If you replace the word love with death it will not create the split in you. Love is a conscious death - not of the body but of the ego, and the ego has been dominating you for many births, for many lives. Its domination has become almost permanent. Love is the only experience that can dethrone it.

If you cannot lose your ego in love, then you can never lose it. And you are not the ego, remember: it is a false idea of yourself, accepted and acquired in ignorance. In love you need humbleness, in love a trust arises on its own. You can expose yourself to the person you love in total vulnerability. But you don’t know that with love this shadow is always there: that it is a kind of death, and particularly your personality feels immensely troubled that you are in such deep love.

So as far as I can see there is no division in you. You just don’t understand the relationship between love and fear. It is absolutely natural for every person who loves to feel fear because he does not know that love is nothing but a graveyard for your ego. And because you are identified with the ego you think, “It is going to be my death.”

All this may not be on the conscious level; it may be going on underneath, in the darkness, in the unconscious part of your psychology. So on the conscious level perhaps you think that you are split into two opposing camps. They are not opposing camps: they are two branches of the same tree, but the tree is hidden in the unconscious and you see only the branches in the conscious. Naturally, they look like two separate things.

So the first thing is: exactly understand that love is the death of the ego, the personality, the false. There is no way to have both love and ego. Either you can have the ego or you can have love - but make it a conscious thing.